Angelica Kauffmann

Kauffmann, Angelica

(äng-gā`lēkä kouf`män), 1741–1807, Swiss neoclassical painter and graphic artist. From her youth she was known for her artistic, musical, and linguistic abilities. She went to England, where she enjoyed success as a fashionable portrait painter and decorator. A protégée of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kauffman was one of the original members of the Royal Academy. She often decorated houses designed by the AdamAdam, Robert, 1728–92, and James Adam,1730–94, Scottish architects, brothers. They designed important public and private buildings in England and Scotland and numerous interiors, pieces of furniture, and decorative objects......Click the link for more information. brothers. After her marriage in 1781 to the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi, she lived in Italy, where she flourished in artistic and literary circles. Reynolds, Winckelmann, Goethe, and Garrick commissioned her to paint their portraits. Representative works include Religion (National Gall., London); Self-Portrait (Staatliche Museen, Berlin); and the etchings of L'Allegra and La Pensierosa. The British Museum has a collection of her drawings and prints.

Bibliography

See study by Lady Victoria Manners and G. C. Williamson (1924).

Kauffmann, Angelica

Born Oct. 30, 1741, in Cur, Switzerland; died Nov. 5, 1807, in Rome. German painter and graphic artist. Representative of classicism.

Kauffmann lived in Italy from 1742 to 1757 and in London from 1766 to 1781. She returned to Italy in 1782 and lived there until her death. Kauffmann painted portraits (portrait of J. W. von Goethe, 1787, Goethe National Museum, Weimar) and sentimental scenes based on mythological, religious, historical, and literary themes (The Farewell of Abelard and Heloise, Hermitage, Leningrad).

Of special interest is the minutely stippled watercolour Portrait of Angelica Kauffman attributed to her then passionate admirer Nathaniel Dance-Holland, though his authorship of this loving study, which may alternatively be by a miniaturist, is still open to debate (Fig.

Her subtle, sensitive portraits made her popular with British, French and German tourists visiting Venice and she is regarded as the best-known female artist of her generation, influencing both [ETH]lisabeth Vige-Lebrun and Angelica Kauffman.

Swiss-born Angelica Kauffman, whose work Andromache Fainting at the Unexpected Sight of Aeneus on his Arrival in Epirus is on longterm loan from Lord Derby's personal collection, was one two female founders of the Royal Academy of Arts.

She concludes that despite the criticism of her as a 'light-weight', Angelica Kauffman was a great painter, at least of portraits if not of historical scenes, 'anacreontic fancies' and subject paintings based on Ovid.

They include 18th-century Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman and Anna Dorothea Therbusch-Lisiewska, a native of Berlin who worked in Paris and was singled out by Catherine the Great's envoy to Paris as an artist to commission.

The influence of Reynolds was paramount in the career of Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), a Royal Academician and highly popular in her lifetime for both her portraiture and history paintings.

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